Cultural Shaming: How Dare You Be Happy When I am Miserable?

How Dare You Be Happy When I am Miserable?

TESSA LENA

There is a lot of shaming going on. 

Who is getting blasted? Naturally, it’s the little guy who breaks the “rules.” 

Any arbitrary rules du jour imposed by the world’s finest superpredators who are making ‘em, breaking ‘em, and paying for the “content” that instructs us whom to trust and what to think in order to maintain a worldview that maximizes their profitsand ensures their lasting economic dominance, whether it requires a status quo or a “Great Reset.” 

The pandemic of shaming people for feeling dignified as individuals or entitled to spiritual and physical sovereignty is nothing new. I remember that strange and toxic beast from my Soviet childhood. There was an implied idea of “them,” the “majority,” “the people,” an entity that was above any individual. It was personified by posters of workers with hammers, by old women full of pain caused by men, and by movie characters dying for the people. “They” were always struggling and thus always “right” because it was pain that made “them” pure and entitled to castigating others. Now I understand that it was a meme put together by the government from scraps of the existing culture—but back then it was just an unhappy, obligating entity that was there because it was a part of the universe. A dictatorship of the unhealed.

The moral case for “masking” the collective spiritual defeat and making it invisible by making everyone participate was so heavy on my soul that I ran away from the cultural bulldozer all the way to the United States. After many years of living in America, the land whose culture swings the other way and favors Big Commerce and Big Indifference, I forgot about my homeland’s mandatory pain. But now that the self-righteous bulldozer is here and at the service of the 0.0001% and their wallets, I am having none of it. I understand this beast’s toxicity no matter how it’s contextualized and spun for aching peasants, and I am really having none of it. This deliberate confusion of love for others with self-betrayal is an ancient weapon in a recent wrapper. I refuse. The heart is sacred.

I was trying to find my truth outside of the beaten path and I found that my quest came with a side effect of making others suffer by being who I was! I was a sticker out! It was as if my soul didn’t belong to me but was the property of “them,” the community, and “they” had the authority to moralize all over my beliefs because the only correct way to see the world was theirs!

The dilemma was impossible: Be happy and thus contribute to the suffering of those around you—because your freedom causes them real pain—or submit your spirit to the communal fest of unimportance. If you choose the former, you are authentic and alone—and if you choose the latter, you betray your sacred heart, and you are forced to spend the rest of your life trying to fill the void with approval of your peers who were just ready to murder you for your authenticity but who will now praise you for being good and not sticking out. And once you check your soul at the door, with time, you’ll surely join the army of equalizers—because the void hurts.

More....